The Lady and the... - NOT AVAILABLE

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Brief Synopsis

A woman sets out to break a criminal gang controlling the dry cleaning business.

Hattie Leonard, a staid Victorian matron who lives in a grand house on a hill, runs both the local bank and the town. When racketeers move into town and demand protection money from the merchants, Hattie discovers her cleaning costs have dramatically increased because the cleaner, Zambrogio, must pay money to the protection organization. Outraged, Hattie requests that the mayor act to rid the town of the racketeers, and when he refuses, she takes matters into her own hands and imports a gang of trigger men led by Frankie O'Fallon, an ex-thug she once helped. Armed with her bulletproof limousine and a raft of machine guns, Hattie then sets out to clean up the town. Discovering that George Watson is the head of the protection racket, Hattie begins to hijack his collectors and return the money to the merchants. When Watson's gunmen retaliate against the merchants, Lila Thorne, the fiancée of Hattie's son Fred, joins forces with her future mother-in-law and lures Watson to the Leonard house, where Hattie grills him and learns that Mayor Jones is the brains behind the rackets. When Hattie demands the mayor's resignation, he orders her thrown in jail for kidnapping Watson. That night, Hattie's boys saw through the bars on her window so that she can leave her cell. Slipping out on successive nights, Hattie calls on the merchants and gives them the money needed to buy protection. The night that Hattie decides to escape, her boys rouse the district attorney and take him to the Leonard bank. There Hattie opens the mayor's safety deposit box and finds the marked bills she had given to the merchants to pay the racketeers, thus implicating the mayor in the scheme.